Richard M. Weaver quotes: top 86 famous quotes by Richard M. Weaver

“The modern state does not comprehend how anyone can be guided by something other than itself. In its eyes pluralism is treason.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.”

— Richard M. Weaver

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

— Richard M. Weaver

“Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.”

— Richard M. Weaver

The typical modern has the look of the hunted.

— Richard M. Weaver

“[I]f we feel that creation does not express purpose, it is impossible to find an authorization for purpose in our own lives.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon; to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Many of us who read the literature of social science as laymen are conscious of being admitted at a door which bears the watchword "scientific objectivity" and of emerging at another door which looks out upon a variety of projects for changing, renovating, or revolutionizing society. In consequence, we feel the need of a more explicit account of how the student of society passes from facts to values or statements of policy.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others' experiences.”

— Richard M. Weaver

One of the most important revelations about a period comes in its theory of language, for that informs us whether language is viewed as a bridge to the noumenal or as a body of fictions convenient for grappling with transitory phenomena.

— Richard M. Weaver

The home was a school. Farm and cabin households, though bookless save for the Family Bible and The Sacred Harp, taught the girls to spin, weave, quilt, cook, sew, and mind their manners; the boys to wield gun, ax, hammer and saw, to ride, plow, sow and reap, and to be men. Nobody need ever be bored. Amusement did not have to be bought.

— Richard M. Weaver

“Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done today in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“[The South] is ****ed for its virtues and praised for its faults, and there are those who wish its annihilation. But most revealing of all is the fear that it gestates the revolutionary impulse of our future.”

— Richard M. Weaver

It is characteristic of the barbarian ... to insist upon seeing a thing "as it is." The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.

— Richard M. Weaver

Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle.

— Richard M. Weaver

Chivalry - ... a romantic idealism closely related to Christianity, which makes honor the guiding principle of conduct. Connected with this is the ancient concept of the gentleman.

— Richard M. Weaver

“Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“When we affirm that philosophy begins with wonder , we are affirming in effect that sentiment is prior to reason .”

— Richard M. Weaver

Somehow the notion has been loosed that nature is hostile to man or that her ways are offensive or slovenly, so that every step of progress is measured by how far we have altered these. Nothing short of a recovery of the ancient virtue of pietas can absolve man from this sin.

— Richard M. Weaver

“The disappearance of the heroic ideal is always accompanied by the growth of commercialism. There is a cause-and-effect relationship here, for the man of commerce is by the nature of things a relativist; his mind is constantly on the fluctuating values of the marketplace, and there is no surer way to fail than to dogmatize and moralize about things.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The prevailing attitude towards nature is that form of heresy which denies substance and, in doing so, denies the rightfulness of creation. We have said - to the point of repletion, perhaps - that man is not to take his patterns from nature; but neither is he to waste himself in seeking to change her face.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects - nay, menaces - the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost.”

— Richard M. Weaver

The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to suffer when life is regarded as a means to something else. Efficiency and charm are mortal enemies, and Southern charm indubitably derives from a carelessness about the efficient aspects of life.

— Richard M. Weaver

“Triumphs against the natural order of living exact unforeseen payments. At the same time that man attempts to straighten a crooked nature, he is striving to annihilate space, which seems but another phase of the war against substance. We ignore the fact that space and matter are shock absorbers; the more we diminish them the more we reduce our privacy and security.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.”

— Richard M. Weaver

A prejudice may be an unreasoned judgment, he [Hibben] pointed out, but an unreasoned judgment is not necessarily an illogical judgment ... First, there are those judgments whose verification has simply dropped out of memory ... The second type of unreasoned judgments we hold is the opinions we adopt from others ... The third class of judgments in Professor Hibben's list comprises those which have subconscious origin. The material that furnishes their support does not reach the focal point of consciousness, but psychology insists upon its existence.

— Richard M. Weaver

“The most important thing about the gentleman was that he was an idealist ... He was bred up to a code of self-restraint which taught resistance to pragmatic temptation. He was definitely a man of sentiment, who refused to put matters on a basis of materialism and self-aggrandizement.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The complete man, then, is the "lover" added to the scientist; the rhetorician to the dialectician.”

— Richard M. Weaver

Before the age of adulteration it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution. It was this that gave zest to labor and served to measure the degree of success.

— Richard M. Weaver

“When you're on the wrong road, sometimes the most progressive man is the one who goes backwards first. As long as there are such people, hope lies in our future.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Knowledge of material reality is the knowledge of death.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The man of culture finds the whole past relevant; the bourgeois and the barbarian find relevant only what has some pressing connection with their appetite.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“We cannot be too energetic in reminding our nihilists and positivists that this is a world of action and history.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The most likely way to kill a tradition is to over-formalize it, which is to carry it on in the same way after everyone has ceased to defer to it. The way to revive it is to show that it has grown out of and is still related to our most cherished values. But this requires radical insight and the stripping away of many things which are mere accretions.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“It may be true that only those minds which are habituated to think logically can safely trust their intuitive conclusions, on the theory that the subconscious level will do its kind of work as faithfully as the conscious does its kind.”

— Richard M. Weaver

The man of frank and strong prejudices, far from being a political and social menace and an obstacle in the path of progress, is often a benign character and helpful citizen. The chance is far greater, furthermore, that he will be more creative than the man who can never come to more than a few gingerly held conclusions, or who thinks that all ideas should be received with equal hospitality. There is such a thing as being so broad you are flat.

— Richard M. Weaver

“The realization that just as no action is really indifferent, so no utterance is without its responsibility introduces, it is true, a certain strenuosity into life.”

— Richard M. Weaver

Since we want not emancipation from impulse but clarification of impulse, the duty of rhetoric is to bring together action and understanding into a whole that is greater than scientific perception.

— Richard M. Weaver

In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called "emotion" and its concomitant of evaluation.

— Richard M. Weaver

“Contempt for the degradation of specialization and pedantry. Specialization develops only part of a man; a man partially developed is deformed.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The member of a culture ... purposely avoids the relationship of intimacy; he wants the object somehow depicted and fictionalized ... He is embarrassed when this is taken out of its context of proper sentiments and presented bare, for he feels that this is a reintrusion of that world which his whole conscious effort has sought to banish. Forms and conventions are the ladder of ascent. And hence the speechlessness of the man of culture when he beholds the barbarian tearing aside some veil which is half adornment, half concealment.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The aristocratic mind ... is anti-analytical. It is concerned more with the status of being than with the demonstrable relationship of parts.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Any utterance is a major assumption of responsibility, and the assumption that one can avoid that responsibility by doing something to language itself is one of the chief considerations of the Phaedrus.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“Beneath the surface of repartee and mock seriousness, [Plato's Phaedrus] is asking whether we ought to prefer a neuter form of speech to the kind which is ever getting us aroused over things and provoking an expense of spirit.”

— Richard M. Weaver

“The case of the Baconians is not won until it has been proved that the substitution of covetousness for wantlessness, or an ascending spiral of desires for a stable requirement of necessities, leads to a happier condition.”